My Pelican Site Setup
#####################
:date: 2021-12-09
:author: jeffmackinnon
:slug: my-pelican-ssg-setup
:status: published

Welcome to my homepage, this page outlines how I have my `Pelican <https://getpelican.com>`__ site, this site, set up.


Installed Plugins
-----------------

First, lets talk about plugins. While Pelican is pretty great 'out of the box', there are some things that are missing and there are some great plugins that fill in the gaps.

Photos
______

The `photos plugin <https://pypi.org/project/pelican-photos/>`__ does exactly the "stuff" that I need for this site. I have tried a couple of other options, but the two features that make this a must have are:

*   They only handle the source images if there is a change. So I don't need to handle 1000s of photos everytime I publish.
*   It creates simple galleries based on folders.

Series
______

While the `series plugin <https://github.com/pelican-plugins/series>`__ not something that I expect to use a lot, it will come in handy. 

Sitemap
_______

This is something I would really love to see added to the vanilla pelican application, adding a `sitemap <https://github.com/pelican-plugins/sitemap>`__ to your site is table stakes when it comes to SEO and working with the search engines.

Plugins installed but rarely used
---------------------------------

I have the `image process plugin <https://github.com/pelican-plugins/image-process>`__ installed but it isn't used right now. I was going to use it to do the processing work for the pictures, but there was two features missing:

#. There was no way to make galleries.
#. They were processed every publish/export

Both of these features are in the Photos plugin mentioned above.

I still have it installed because there is a lot more flexibility in how it can be used, and if I want to have `open graph <https://ogp.me/>`__ images that are sized specially for twitter, etc I can't do that with photos.

Theme
-----

The theme is public `here <https://git.jeffmackinnon.com/jeff/theme-jeffmackinnon.com>`__, at some point I will figure out git releases/tags and how to build a wheel, etc.

Hosting
-------

I use `websavers <https://clients.websavers.ca/whmcs/aff.php?aff=65>`__ for my hosting and domain registration. It is a great local webhost for any homepage or small business site.

FTP Client
----------

I really want to get `lftp <https://lftp.yar.ru/>`__ working so I can just ``make lftp`` from the command like and get everything updated, but there is still some debugging there. So instead I use `Filezilla <https://filezilla-project.org/>`__ which is a very robust FTP solution.